Climate Change Denial: A Brief Overview
Due to the reality that climate change can only be mitigated by taking steps to shake up the established workings of the modern world, denial is arguably the most important topic surrounding the study of climate change. With recent news of EPA head Scott Pruitt publicly going on record that he rejects that carbon dioxide and human emissions are the primary driver of climate change, along with President Trump’s budget proposal which would cut EPA funding by 31% and eliminate over 20% of its workforce (Soffen and Lu 2017), dealing with denialism is now a more pressing issue than ever. Climate change denial is waging a war against the environmental movement and climate scientists who are in overwhelming agreement about the anthropogenic causes of climate change, and right now, denial is decisively winning as a result of the vast resources they have on their side. If we hope to get anything done about climate change, we have to start with the denial movement, which stands in direct opposition to the knowledge and measures that need to be taken to avert climate change from having catastrophic effects on our planet.
Like many of the aspects of climate change, climate change denial is a complex subject with many moving parts. As stated in The Anthropology of Climate Change, climate change denial encompasses four key features, which are: that it is strategically coordinated, it is a response to climate change threatening a certain ideology, its means of funding and organizational structures are covert, and it seeks to manufacture doubt and confusion in the minds of the public and policymakers (Baer and Singer 2014, 122-123). Essentially, the system of climate change denial is powered by two major mechanisms which work hand in hand- the climate change counter movement that involves the larger economic, political, and organizational forces in play, and the unwillingness of individual people and society as a whole to take meaningful action. This first mechanism is the root that climate change denial originates from, while the second mechanism is the dispersal of denial that affects all of the branches connected to the root. Both of these mechanisms are intertwined with one another, making climate change denial an extremely tough issue to try to solve.
The history of climate change denial can be traced back to the late 1970’s, when the environmental movement and the burgeoning field of impact science came to the forefront of the U.S. government’s attention. After a group of elite scientific advisors led by MIT professor Jule Charney were assembled and determined that carbon dioxide was already impacting the climate and would cause visible signs to appear in the next few decades if carbon output continued to increase, the next few academic reports undermined the science behind these findings (Oreskes and Conway 2010, 173-179). These subsequent reports, headed by economists like Thomas Schnelling and Cold War physicists like Bill Nierenberg and Fred Singer, succeeded in preventing the creation of a federal emissions reduction program by over-exaggerating the uncertainty of carbon projections done by Charney and his team. Charney’s committee knew based on the climate models they created that carbon dioxide would have serious ramifications on the Earth’s climate, but due to the fact that this was brand new research, they couldn’t be 100% sure of exactly what that would look like and how much global temperatures would rise by. All of the evidence supported their conclusion that carbon needed to be reduced to prevent the climate from changing, but this tiny amount of uncertainty was seen by Schnelling, Nierenberg, and Singer as an opportunity to put off the problem of climate change, as they argued that we could adapt or migrate when the time comes but in the meantime there was no reason to panic (Oreskes and Conway 2010, 178-179).
These skeptics were just a small group of people, but their power and enormous influence effectively took climate change and the environment off the political agenda entirely during the 1980’s. From there, climate change denial really took off in the early-mid 1990’s, leading to the climate change denial movement that has become ingrained in America, and particularly in the Republican party. This strategy of making it seem like climate change is something that can be debated, rather than a nearly unanimous scientific fact, can still be seen in the rhetoric of government officials today, such as Marco Rubio’s statement that, “I believe that the climate is changing because there’s never been a moment when the climate is not changing” (Kolbert 2015), and Scott Pruitt’s declaration that more research needs to be done before we can accept that human activity is responsible for the change in climate (Mooney and Dennis 2017). Comments like these underscore the fact that the climate change counter movement is a “subsidiary movement of the larger conservative movement” (Brulle 2013, 8), which is united by its stringent adherence to market fundamentalism and neoliberal ideology that is beholden to the interests of the fossil fuel industry and large corporation like ExxonMobil and the Koch Brothers. These companies and the disingenuous conservative politicians know that actions taken to prevent climate change will diminish their profits, and what they are saying via their denial of climate change is that their short-term gains and prosperity outweigh the needs of the rest of us and the future of our planet. Astronomical levels of greed and institutional corruption are exhibited by all the principal actors involved in the denial movement (which includes conservative think tanks, untraceable Donors Trust funds, contrarian scientists, and the conservative media) (Dunlap and McCright 2010, 245-246), showing that climate change denial is a political machine put in place to uphold the status quo and ensure that the exploitative nature of capitalism can continue to function uninhibited.
The denial movement is only one part of why nothing about climate change ever seems to get done though; each of us standing by idly and not doing anything are culpable as well. As documented in an article about individual attitudes in Norway titled We Don’t Really Want to Know, the average person in an industrialized nation is well-informed and demonstrates concern about changing climate patterns, yet paradoxically, most people do not take action against climate change (and we just elected a man who has said that climate change is a "hoax" created by the Chinese) (Norgaard 2006, 348-350). Recent Gallup polling confirms this, finding that Americans are now more worried about climate change than ever before and more than 6 in 10 Americans believe that climate change is already starting to have an effect on us (Bump 2017). In this way, denial by individuals who collectively make up society has less to do with blatantly refusing to believe that climate change exists and more to do with cognitive dissonance and an unwillingness to change the way we live. Just a few days ago, I was listening to a political talk show that was discussing climate change, and one of the panelists being interviewed said that there aren’t any viable solutions to climate change, yet in the same breath he said that there is no way he is going to start doing things like biking to work or taking a bus instead of driving his car. We, as a society, have gotten so used to our technology and privileged lifestyles that we can’t fathom what we would do without them, so we choose to remain blissfully ignorant and go on pretending that climate change doesn’t need to be addressed.
Climate change denial is truly a problem with no easy answers. It is not inevitable that climate change will radically alter our world, but the measures that need to be taken to ensure that this doesn’t happen will require an ideological paradigm shift in how we think (Klein 2015, 25). Not only that, but we will also need a complete political realignment so that the U.S. government and other nations around the globe can develop and uphold comprehensive laws that will reduce emissions and move toward sustainable energy sources. However, it’s unlikely that either of these will happen anytime soon, and by the time they do it will be far too late. According to the International Energy Agency, “if we do not get our emissions under control by 2017, our fossil fuel economy will ‘lock in’ extremely dangerous warming” (Klein 2015, 22), which would mean that global temperatures will almost certainly rise by at least 2°C by the end of this century and lead to life-threatening effects like rapid sea-level rise and heat waves (Klein 2015, 12-13). It’s already 2017, and with every passing day, the amount of destruction climate change is causing and will cause in coming decades increases. Considering that members of the climate change denial movement still refuse to believe in climate change at all, even when 97-98% of the top climate researchers with peer-reviewed publications are telling us that climate change is real and caused by human activity (Anderegg et. al 2010), it makes you wonder when they will wake up and see the light. Sadly, it will probably take an unprecedented natural disaster that threatens the lives of people in the U.S. or another industrialized nation before denialism ceases to exist. For now, the best we can do is individually reduce our own emissions, lower our consumption of resources, and do anything else to become active and raise awareness of taking action against climate change.
References
Anderegg, William R. L., James W. Prall, Jacob Harold, and Stephen H. Schneider. "Expert credibility in climate change." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 27 (July 6, 2010): 12107-2109. April 9, 2010. Accessed March 18, 2017. doi:10.1073/pnas.1003187107.
Baer, Hans A., and Merrill Singer. The anthropology of climate change: an integrated critical perspective. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group/Earthscan from Routledge, 2014. Accessed March 18, 2017. http://0-ebookcentral.proquest.com.skyline.ucdenver.edu/lib/cudenver/reader.action?docID=1682317.
Brulle, Robert J. "Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations." Climatic Change 122, no. 4 (December 21, 2013): 681-94. doi:10.1007/s10584-013-1018-7.
Bump, Philip. "Don’t look now, but reality is winning the climate debate." The Washington Post. March 15, 2017. Accessed March 18, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/03/15/dont-look-now-but-reality-is-winning-the-climate-debate/?utm_term=.514a336f37fd.
Dunlap, Riley E., and Aaron M. Mccright. "Climate change denial." Routledge Handbook of Climate Change and Society, 2010, 240-59. Accessed March 18, 2017. doi:10.4324/9780203876213.ch14.
Klein, Naomi. This changes everything: capitalism vs. the climate. London: Penguin Books, 2015.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. "Miami Underwater." The New Yorker. December 10, 2015. Accessed March 18, 2017. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/12/21/the-siege-of-miami.
Mooney, Chris, and Brady Dennis. "On climate change, Scott Pruitt causes an uproar — and contradicts the EPA's own website." The Washington Post. March 09, 2017. Accessed March 18, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/03/09/on-climate-change-scott-pruitt-contradicts-the-epas-own-website/.
Norgaard, K. M. ""We Don't Really Want to Know": Environmental Justice and Socially Organized Denial of Global Warming in Norway." Organization & Environment 19, no. 3 (September 2006): 347-70. Accessed March 18, 2017. doi:10.1177/1086026606292571.
Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of doubt: how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoking to global warming. London: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Soffen, Kim, and Denise Lu. "What's getting cut in Trump's budget." The Washington Post. March 16, 2017. Accessed March 18, 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-presidential-budget-2018-proposal/?tid=sm_tw.